Extreme Weather

Voice 2:And I'm Marina Santee. Spotlight uses a special English method of broadcasting. It is easier for people to understand, no matter where in the world they live.

Voice 1:Extreme weather is happening more often in different parts of the world. There are more storms, floods, and droughts. Droughts are long dry periods with no rain. Many people are wondering if this is connected to climate change. Climate change affects weather conditions around the world.

Two examples of extreme weather are the terrible fires and floods that happened in Australia in the first two months of 2009.

Voice 2:The state of Victoria is in south-east Australia. Here, in February, 173 people died in bushfires. Hundreds more were injured. A bushfire is a fire that happens in open country, called ‘the bush' in Australia. These were the worst bushfires ever recorded in that state.

Saturday, February 7 was the day when the fires killed most people. People in Victoria now call it Black Saturday. Temperatures were higher than 40 degrees Celsius on that day. In the early evening, the wind changed its direction from the north east to the south west. It had a speed of more than 120 kilometres an hour. The new wind caused huge new fires that moved at great speed towards towns that had escaped earlier fires.

Voice 1:Altogether, 78 small country towns were damaged. Some were almost completely destroyed. Over 7500 people lost their homes. One fire expert said the energy produced by those fires in a few hours was enough for the state's total energy needs for a year.

Voice 2:At the same time as Victoria's towns were burning, the state of Queensland was also in big trouble. Queensland is in the north east part of Australia. The worst floods in twenty years were happening here. Normal floods caused by heavy rain were made worse by a cyclone. A cyclone is a kind of storm that brings high winds. This one came from the Pacific Ocean. It brought heavy rain and huge waves on the coast during January.

Voice 1:Two weeks later another cyclone brought more heavy rain and floods over a big part of north Queensland. Many towns were surrounded by water. Thousands of homes were flooded. Many families were forced to look for shelter in other places.

Voice 2:A week after that, on February 6 and 7, more heavy rain made the floods even worse. While people in Victoria were dying in the Black Saturday bushfires, 236 millimetres of rain fell on the Queensland town of Ingham. The flood water in that town was twelve point five metres deep.

Voice 1:Australians are wondering what causes such extreme weather. Australian Government scientists say it may be caused by ‘rapid climate change'. They say that it is happening all over the world.

Records of weather in Australia show that average temperatures in this continent rose by nearly one degree Celsius in the last 50 years. There have also been more ‘heatwaves'. These are times when the temperature stays very high for many days. And there are fewer cold days in the year. Records made in other parts of the world tell the same story. Planet Earth is becoming warmer. Scientists call this ‘global warming'.

Voice 2:As well as higher temperatures on the land surface, there are other signs of global warming. They include warmer ocean temperatures, less snow and ice, and rising sea levels.